Open Plus adds more opportunities for participation and involvement in the work whether as a creator, or as part of what used to be called ‘the audience’.

6. Reveal the process
Allowing access to not only the final source media, but work-in-progress material and software files, adding another layer of transparency and documentation.

7. Open contribution
Adding ways to influence and participate in the creation of the original work through various types of community/audience involvement (opportunities such as open crewing, direct feedback or contribution mechanisms).

There are different flavours of open media, and these states can accommodate most Pioneering open movie projects like Blender’s Elephants Dream and Modfilm’s Sanctuary count as open source media because they allow you to access the source files. The recent release of the copyright documentary, Steal This Film, illustrates extreme openness rejecting any copyright and licensing restrictions, but doesn’t provide source media. The same is true for the Creative Commons-licensed machinima feature film Bloodspell.

Next generation projects like the upcoming Peach animated film from Blender team, our own A Swarm of Angels feature film project, and the opensourcecinema.org documentary illustrate the more transparent and flexible end of the open content spectrum.

Open source media is not open source technology. It doesn’t have the same rules but some common properties. It should have some minimum requirements, so it is easier for everyone to immediately figure out how open the media you want to enjoy really is.

The “Plus” part of their delineation (quoted above) concerns the community processes around media creation, a topic often left out of formal definitions of openness, though very much part of the longstanding conversation carrying over from the software world (cf. The Cathedral and the Bazaar). In other ways “Open Plus” does not go as far as the Definition of Free Cultural Works, which does not allow for usage restrictions.

Speaking of Elephants Dream (mentioned in the quote above, and code-named Project Orange when it was under development), we’ve been incredibly remiss in not mentioning two very cool follow on projects — Project Peach, another open movie, and Project Apricot, an open game built using many of the same technologies. These are incredibly exciting projects from the Blender Institute with the dual goals of creating excellent product and tuning up the open media creation toolchain. All of the non-software components of these projects are available under the non-restrictive CC BY license with source materials available in an open format — clearly free cultural works.

Finally, news about two films on copyright in the digital age:

Steal This Film 2, which we mentioned back in November, is now available. Unfortunately it isn’t under a CC license, supposedly “so you can still steal it”, though the material is highly relevant.

CopyCat will be under a CC BY-SA license, but is still in the planning stages:

The focus of the web series will be the Internet itself and the effects it has had on society, US and global. It will make use of pop culture references, wit, and satire of current events. (The humor, however, will be a delivery system for the information, not the end-all of the series.) It will be fast-paced, much like the documentary style of the films Loose Change and Good Copy, Bad Copy. It will use elements of the personal nature of Michael Moore’s filmmaking (following one person’s opinion) with the cineme verete qualities of narrator-less films like Jesus Camp, and it will switch between the two based on the subject covered.